The Role of Social Rights and Justiciability. A Reading From the Classic Key Issues of Social Policy

Abstract

In recent years in Latin America the role of rights and increased participation of the judicial branch as the satisfaction level to settle claims related to social rights it was increased. The academic papers often addressed these issues tended to overlook the place of public policy (specifically social policy) and market economy. The hypothesis that guides this article is that the complex and changing relationship between the egalitarian aspirations of social rights and the mechanisms for providing goods and services in capitalist societies-or in other words the scope and limitations of the rights and the actions of the justice- may best be understood from a closer to the social policy and welfare economics approach. This contribution allows to introduce the concepts of commodification and decommodification as central dimensions of analysis to understand the institutional and political processes that shape the provision of satisfaction of social needs and are mediated by the conflictive logic of rights.